Analyst's note: Absolutely must read and carefully consider. The meaning of the word home is not just the dwelling place of the family, but the family institution itself. The family is the foundation of this nation. The family, centered on marriage, is really the basic unit of any successful, sustainable society. This institution is under significant attack. Although some would have us to believe otherwise, the correct principles associated with families have remained true throughout time. It has been said that “The home is the first and most effective place for children to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self-control; the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home.” To those who bear the standards of truth, opposition is bound to arise and courage is needed to do what is right. For example, in California we learned today that Protecting sexual integrity of boys disqualifies you as a judge.
The Gay Gestapo has made a big-time move in California. If you're a judge in that state and you happen to be a fan of sexual normalcy and want impressionable young teens to be protected from sexual predators, your professional career in the law could be over.
Even though Infant mortality declines in the U.S., CDC report says, problems still exist.
"The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than rates in most other developed countries. In fact, by her reckoning, "the relative position of the United States in comparison to countries with the lowest infant mortality rates appears to be worsening."
[....] A graphic created by political blogger Juan Cole using U.S. Census data shows that Southern states average infant mortality rates between 8 and 11 per 1,000 live births, while the Coasts and Midwest average between 4-6 deaths per 1,000.
Please read on and learn about studies that have also uncovered a destructive downward cycle involving the young boys here in America. A lost generation of American boys will ripple through our society in many and varied ways, with devastating results to our nation and ultimately our national defense. Large-sample social science examining the family structure finds that children of both genders raised by their biological parents, on average, fare better. That’s one reason state policies promoting traditional marriage are both rational and beneficial.
Because of government policies that fail to protect families and improve opportunities for employment, the Brookings Institute has observed in the last 10 years, the poor population in our suburbs across America has ballooned to 64%, compared to 29% in our cities. It is time to stop social experimentation and get back to the basics. There are ways to end poverty and it is not simply a matter of money. It takes more than just good intentions or some form of wealth redistribution. Learning responsibility and self-reliance are good places to start and they are best learned in the home.
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In our opinion: Saving American men
Deseret News Editorial, Feb. 2 2014
What is happening to young men?
The question may take you by surprise. Indeed, few things have been as under-reported as the way a rising generation of American men is failing in every important measurement, from obtaining a higher education to establishing a foothold in the labor market and taking responsibility for the children they father.
In his recent State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama spent a bit of time decrying a well-worn statistic that reportedly shows women in America earning 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. This, he said, “is an embarrassment.”
But while it is true that women ought to be paid equally for the same work as men, the real embarrassment may be that the 77-cent figure is misleading.
If you account for differences in education levels and the choices people make to pursue lower-paying professions, the wage gap closes to about 91 cents on the dollar. But if you look closer, the gap may not only disappear, it may exist in the other direction. A number of factors indicate trends will put males, not females, in danger in the workforce of the future.
A few years ago, researcher James Chung found that single, childless women under the age of 30 in the largest U.S. cities earned on average 8 percent more than their male peers.
A report by Tad Walch in today’s Deseret News cites other statistics, such as that men today earn only 38 percent of all associate degrees, 43 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 40 percent of master’s degrees. Over the past 30 years, women have earned almost 10 million more college degrees than men.
Also in Walch’s report: The National Center for Education predicts the growth in female enrollment in college will outpace the growth in male enrollment 16 percent to 7 percent between 2011 and 2021.
Some may cheer this development or see it as a long-awaited turning of the tables against male domination. But education, the workforce and the rearing of future generations are not zero-sum games. One gender does not win by virtue of the other losing. That is especially true when it comes to raising children.
About 40 percent of all babies these days are born out of wedlock. A wide range of studies show the disadvantages they will face, as well as that married couples earn more money than single mothers and are, in the aggregate, much better prepared to provide for their offspring materially and emotionally.
Studies also have uncovered a destructive downward cycle involving young boys, in particular, who grow up to repeat the cycle of creating, then abandoning, children. These men tend not to obtain college degrees.
These changes are coming at a time when a bachelor’s degree is considered a minimum requirement for earning a decent living, and when the gap in earnings is widening between those who are educated and those who are not.
Reasons for this are many and varied, but the culture plays a huge role. Young men seem conditioned to regard things other than an education as most valuable in life.
This, however, is not true for all, and the reasons for the difference are worth noting.
Walch’s report highlights members of the Loan Peak High School national championship basketball team, as did reporting earlier this week by reporter Trent Toone. Many of the players, despite the high-profile glamor of athletic scholarship offers, are currently serving full-time missions for their church. Not all have had easy lives, and yet the team was characterized as much by the politeness and positive outlooks of its players as by the way they played on the court.
Clearly, religious conviction played a large role in the way these young men learned to prioritize their lives. Religious training is a key to guiding the wayward boys of America toward success.
America must be awakened to the plight of its rising generation of men. Governments need to orient themselves more toward strengthening families, providing opportunities for young men to obtain educations and protecting religious liberties. A lost generation of American boys will ripple through society and many and varied ways, with devastating results.
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In our opinion: A mom and a dad
Deseret News Editorial, April 6, 2014
When a man and a woman marry and have children, that union has a strong impact on those children and, consequently, a strong impact on the society of which those children become a part. For decades, social science researchers have investigated how family structure affects children by measuring their social and academic progress.
This social science data-gathering dispassionately can help society discern what type of family structure, on average, helps children the most. It can help to guide rationally what policies encourage and promote the kind of stable family life that leads to human flourishing.
“Research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family structure headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage,” wrote Kristen Anderson Moore, Susan Jekielek and Carol Emig in a research summary for ChildTrends. “(I)t is not simply the presence of two parents, as some have assumed, but the presence of two biological parents that seems to support children’s development.”
There is widespread agreement about this fact when looking at traditional marriage. Now, as courts, legislators and social scientists turn to the hotly contested issue of same-sex marriage, should this wealth of existing evidence about family structure be ignored? No. In fact, family structure research is more relevant than ever before.
This week, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver will hear an appeal of the federal district court decision that temporarily struck down Utah’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Other state constitutions are also being litigated. A challenge to Oklahoma’s traditional definition of marriage will be heard soon by the same three-judge appellate panel.
Emotions about this issue are understandably high. Indeed, emotion is at the heart of the effort to redefine marriage from a conjugal relationship of responsibility for the rearing of children to a romantic attachment for adults. But as our federal judicial system considers a wholesale change to how the foundational institution of marriage is defined within our federal constitutional system, reason needs to hold sway.
We applaud the vigorous yet respectful defense of traditional marriage mounted by Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and Attorney General Sean Reyes. In addition to the constitutional arguments for reversing the district court decision, Utah citizens and lawmakers have many sound and rational policy reasons to retain the traditional definition of marriage.
Utah highlighted these reasons by noting social science evidence throughout its opening brief, focusing on the impact of family structure from dozens of studies, journal articles and books. The brief showed how “the two sexes bring different talents to the parenting enterprise,” how “the weight of scientific evidence seems clearly to support the view that fathers matter,” how the absence of a father places a daughter at special risk for early sexual activity, that children in same-sex households experience lower high school graduation rates, and that there are higher rates of depression, delinquency and substance abuse among children conceived through sperm donation.
Some advocates of same-sex marriage dismiss or attempt to discredit this research. In the Utah case, the plaintiffs largely ignored the state’s evidence. In same-sex battles in other states, including Michigan, critics engaged in ad hominem attacks, attempting to rebut research by pointing out how many sociology professors at the researcher’s university disagree with the implications of his study.
Some point to the American Psychological Association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting, which looked at 59 studies on the subject and concluded that “not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.”
But Louisiana State University professor Loren Marks examined these 59 studies in excruciating detail and found that each of them relied upon small, self-selected samples of lesbian or gay parents. The aggregation of these convenience-based samples is less statistically significant than results from robust comprehensive data sets now in use by researchers in the U.S. and Canada.
Yet these more comprehensive studies are being held to a double standard. To those who critique the lack of stable same-sex couples in such data sets, the proper response is that it is not a “fatal flaw” to examine facts from a population-based data set.
“Children in homes with their married biological parents perform better than the other family types measured; that is, compared to cohabitating, single, or same sex households,” said Douglas Allen, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University who has studied results from both the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2006 Canadian Census.
In this last study, Allen found that girls in a home with homosexual fathers had a 15 percent chance of graduating, compared with girls in a home with a mother and a father. Girls in a home with lesbian mothers had a 45 percent chance of graduating, relative to the mother and father. The relative graduation ratio for girls with a single dad was 46 percent, and 51 percent for girls with a single moms. The point of such research is not about casting aspersions on any particular parents, straight or gay, but about understanding the consequence — on average — for a child raised in such a union.
As the 10th Circuit reviews the creative constitutional interpretation of Utah District Judge Robert Shelby, one of the standards it will consider is whether Utah’s decision to define marriage as between one man and one woman meets a so-called “rational basis test.” Large-sample social science examining family structure find that children raised by their biological parents, on average, fare better. That’s one reason why state policies promoting traditional marriage are both rational and beneficial.
As the Deseret News editorialized in October 2013, “It makes no sense for society to fundamentally alter such an institution without understanding the consequences.”
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California: Protecting sexual integrity of boys disqualifies you as a judge
By Bryan Fischer, OneNewsNow.com April 22, 2014
The Gay Gestapo has made a big-time move in California. If you're a judge in that state and you happen to be a fan of sexual normalcy and want impressionable young teens to be protected from sexual predators, your professional career in the law could be over.
While the Boy Scouts of America have foolishly and uselessly allowed homosexuals to become scouts, they have drawn the line at allowing sexual deviants to be scoutmasters.
Allowing gay scouts is foolish because it risks exposing young teens to older teen males who have a sexual interest in other boys. Scouts usually camp two to a tent. Any parent in their right mind want to send their 13-year-old boy on one of those trips?
And it is foolish because it won't work, by which I mean it will buy them no goodwill from the Gay Gestapo whatsoever. The BSA only abandoned the sexual standards that had guided the organization since its founding out of craven capitulation to the deviancy cabal, which insisted on it as the price of admission to their version of polite society. But the move was destined to fail because the BSA didn't go the full Monty and allow homosexuals to serve as scoutmasters.
Their sop to the gay lobby was bound to please no one. And it didn't. Parents have been pulling their sons out of scouting so fast it'll give you a nosebleed, and BSA's cowardice prompted the formation of a pro-family alternative, Trail Life USA. And homosexual activists are outraged that the BSA offered them only half a loaf.
We've often made the point that nothing is ever enough for the gay lobby. You can only appease them by giving them every single solitary thing they want, and even that is not enough. They are like the leech described in Proverbs 30:15: "The leech has two daughters; 'Give,' and 'Give,' they cry." In the case of the BSA, the gay leeches demand that young boys be exposed to active homosexuals or they will make the BSA feel their wrath.
And so the Gay Gestapo has made a big-time move in California. The California Supreme Court Advisory Committee on the Code of Judicial Ethics is now proposing that any affiliation with the Boy Scouts disqualify any man from ever serving as a judge in the Golden State.
Yes, you read that right. If you happen to be a fan of sexual normalcy and want impressionable young teens to be protected from sexual predators, your professional career in the law will be over, perhaps before it has ever begun.
The Scouts are to be identified as a group that practices "invidious discrimination," which, of course, is exactly what the California Supreme Court would not only be practicing but celebrating with this new diktat. You can't get much more "invidious" than wrecking a man's career because he believes in protecting the sexual integrity of teenagers.
The new McCarthyite inquisitors demand to know, "Are you now, or have you ever been, affiliated with the Boy Scouts?"
The point of this new ban is to "enhance public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary," according to the benighted and self-deceived souls on this committee. How exactly, one wonders, does one enhance confidence in "impartiality" by a blatant display of the worst kind of partiality imaginable?
This is Orwellian to an astonishing degree, a fact made more notable by the fact that the members of this committee seem fatuously oblivious to the reality that they are practicing the very sins they condemn. The Supreme Court, in the name of tolerance, would be terminating with extreme prejudice the judicial careers of anyone who does not hold pre-approved opinions about the wonders of sodomy.
Thus the Court, in a burst of wild-eyed and renegade activism, would violate every First Amendment right of every potential judge. Exercise your right to the free exercise of a religion that rejects homosexuality? Disqualified. Exercise freedom of speech by mentioning the health risks of homosexual behavior? Disqualified. Exercise freedom of the press by writing about the importance of man-woman marriage for the upbringing of children? Disqualified. Exercise freedom of association by hanging with an organization that wants sexually normal leaders? Disqualified.
"Invidious discrimination" is the mildest term that applies to such pig-headed, Nazi-esque tyranny.
California still has a chance as this proposal is coming from an "advisory" committee. This advisory committee should be forthwith advised that its proposal is headed to the nearest toxic waste dump where it belongs.
Bryan Fischer is director of issues analysis for the American Family Association. He hosts "Focal Point with Bryan Fischer" every weekday on AFR Talk from 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. (Central).
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